Abracadabra: I Create With My Words

Let’s play a game.

Instead of saying “I can’t do it,” try saying “I’m learning how to…”
Instead of saying “It’s impossible,” try saying “I want to see how I could make it work.”
Instead of saying “It’s hard,” try saying “It’s challenging, and I’ll learn something from it.”

When I offer this exercise during sessions, I often notice how much we underestimate the power of words. So often, we use with ourselves the same language we heard from our parents or our teachers, and we repeat to ourselves the very sentences we were told as children.

And the problem is: we believe them!

That’s a problem because language has immense creative power.

Thanks to research in epigenetics, we now know that thoughts, emotions, and perceptions shape your experience and, over time, can also influence your biology. The way you speak to yourself can support—or interfere with—your body’s wellbeing processes. This is why the power of your mind is greater than you imagine, and it expresses itself through language, too.

Every word you say helps shape what you live.

The words you speak to yourself create your inner reality and, over time, influence your outer reality as well: your life is deeply connected to what you focus on inside and what you express outside.

It’s a different way of seeing things—especially if for a long time you believed everything was random and that you could only react to whatever happened. It’s hard to accept when you’re used to feeling like a victim, stuck, or powerless.

And no, you’re not “just telling the truth.” Truth has many perspectives. If you keep looking at it from the same angle, nothing changes. You won’t change—you’ll stay right there.

That’s why our work together matters.

If I can support you in shifting even slightly from your habitual perspective, helping you see that healthier viewpoints exist for you—if together we loosen the grip of old beliefs—then new possibilities open up.

You breathe more deeply.

You feel freer.

And life can begin to change.

Choosing more empowering words is a foundational step in this process. “Abracadabra,” the well-known magic formula, literally means “I create with words.”

This takes self-observation. It takes thinking before you speak. It takes pausing for a moment before you respond. And above all, it takes working with the words you say to yourself—learning to soothe that inner voice that keeps repeating: “you can’t do it,” “you’re not enough,” “you always mess up.”

My role in this work is to help you recognize the part of you that sabotages you, build a relationship with it, and support an integration process. Because it isn’t that simple: this is a holistic process, and willpower alone isn’t enough. The mind alone isn’t enough—we also need the power of the body and the trust of the spirit.

Your role is to truly want change. To want to begin, little by little, to treat yourself with more respect and more love.

📋✍️ An exercise you can try

Take a sheet of paper and a pen and carry them with you throughout the day—or even better, for several days in a row. Write down what you say to yourself.

Your inner dialogue.

The words you use most often when you look at yourself in the mirror, or in quiet moments when you’re talking to yourself.

Noticing them will take effort—you’ll need to pay real attention. And please, write everything down.

When you’re done, look at what you’ve been saying and ask yourself: would I say all of this to another human being? And what if I were speaking to a child?

 

References

"The Biology of Belief" Bruce Lipton. A popular science book on the relationship between environment, perception, and gene expression.

Meaney, M. J. (2010) "Epigenetics and the biological definition of gene–environment interactions" Child Development". An important study on how environment and experience influence gene expression.

Slavich, G. M., & Cole, S. W. (2013) "The Emerging Field of Human Social Genomics"  Clinical Psychological Science. Shows how stress, relationships, and social perception influence the activity of genes linked to inflammation.

Blackburn, E. & Epel, E. (2017) "The Telomere Effect". Research on the link between psychological stress, thinking, and cellular aging.

Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013) "Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Shows that the way you interpret stress changes the body’s physiological response.

Benedetti, F. (2014) "Placebo Effects" A foundational study on how expectations and beliefs produce real biological changes.\